


It's A Hundred Thousand Miles Off, Coming Closer Every Day

by ialpiriel



Category: Tyranny (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Names, tfw everything your not-boss says is probably a veiled threat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-14
Updated: 2017-07-14
Packaged: 2018-12-02 06:48:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11503977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ialpiriel/pseuds/ialpiriel
Summary: Mara and Bleden Mark have a discussion. Pre-Conquest.





	It's A Hundred Thousand Miles Off, Coming Closer Every Day

“It’s Mara, right?” Bleden Mark asks. He paces in front of her, and she watches, follows him with her eyes, but doesn't move.

“Survives-The-Fire,” Mara replies. “Mara only to uncomfortable humans.”

Mark snorts. He smiles, too, bright and white against his dark skin and red tattoos.

“Is that your discomfort, or theirs?” Mark asks. He steps out of the edge of Mara’s peripheral vision. After a moment, she closes her eyes.

“Theirs,” she replies. “Uncomfortable humans pay too much attention. They look for a beast. Comfortable humans call me Mara.” She opens her eyes. “Simple Mara is an oddity. Strange. Stupid. Uncivilized. Simple Mara can’t understand laws, can’t think things bigger than food.” She unfolds her hands, squares her shoulders, inclines her chin. “Simple Mara does what Tunon says because Simple Mara follows Alpha.” Mara snorts. “Survives-The-Fire can understand laws. Survives-The-Fire can watch and learn. Survives-The-Fire does what Tunon says because Tunon has power. Survives-The-Fire is strange among humans and strange among kith.” She turns her head to look at Bleden Mark, and folds her hands behind her back again. “But kith look, kith smell, kith hear names, and kith accept. Humans worry, worry, worry.”

“What is your name, among the beastwomen?” Mark asks, paces back in front of her.

“Survives-The-Fire, hunter of the Bounding Vipers clan, raised by Prima-broodmother.” She pauses. “As an oddity.”

Bleden Mark laughs, throws his head back and lets it fill the room.

“Do comfortable humans really pay that little attention to _you_?” He says it like it’s a compliment, but also like he doesn’t believe it. He leans in, hunger in his eyes. Mara tips her head to the side, then straightens back out.

“Simple Mara is a slobbering imbecile beast. I heard she can’t read. I heard she’s only here to do _service_ for the archons. I heard she sneaks out at night and sleeps with the animals. I heard she’s like one of those birds--she’ll say what you say back to you, but she doesn’t really understand.” Mara watches Mark as he prowls around her. “She’s too stupid to understand, aren’t you, Simple Mara? Can you even understand us? Did living with the beasts make your brain leak out your ears?”

“And what did you do?” Mark is behind her, nearly leaning over her shoulder, his voice low and soft in her ear.

“Smiled like an idiot,” Mara replies. “Beat all of them in archery classes, learned every law, didn’t tell them my name. I’ve let them all think I’m too stupid to be real.”

There’s somethig nsoft, a subtle, almsot imperceptible change in the air--the hairs on the back of her neck raise for just a moment, a breeze across her cheek, one hair on her head not where it’s supposed to be, and it takes her a moment to relocate Mark in the room. She turns to face him, and can’t see him, but there’s a shadow behind the door, and when she tips her head just right she sees his eyes peering out at her, two flat yellow shapes in the dark. She blinks, and there’s another imperceptible change, and she spins to face him again.

“Oh, you _are_ a sharp one,” he laughs. “I have a proposition for you, Survives-The-Fire.”

Mara nods, keeps her eyes on Mark. He fades back into reality somewhere between one blink and another.

“Every year I take a few promising young fatebinders out into the woods, and we play a game. Whoever wins, wins, and I teach you a few tricks.”

“And if we lose?” Mara asks, presents the obvious question that Mark immediately, gleefully answers.

“You die!” he says. “It’s really quite the privilege to be given a chance to train, and I thought you showed exactly the sort of promise I look for in my trainees.”

“I’ll do it,” Mara says, cuts him off before he can keep talking. 

He looks like, if he wasn’t who he is, he would be bouncing on his feet, clapping elatedly.

“I haven’t chosen the other candidates yet, but I certainly look forward to seeing how this year’s training turns out. Keep well, Survives-The-Fire.”

There’s the thrill up the back of her neck again, and she blinks, and he’s gone. She pauses a moment, feels for that tiny shift in where everything is, the crackle of power that rolls off all archons whether they try to hide it or not, and finds nothing.

She waits a long minute before she leaves the room, goes to prowl the library in silence.


End file.
